In the last ten years technology has permeated our lives to the degree that most of us feel we can’t live without it. In fact, many of us are actually addicted to it. How does this addiction affect our personal and public lives? What, if anything, should we do about it? Where is it taking us? Why should we even care? These are just some of the questions that will be addressed in this paper. A neutral, scientific approach will be used in my research. However, since this is a relatively new field of study, I will also interject my own opinion along with that of the experts.
First, we need to decide if our use of technology is an addiction or just a habit? Most psychologist define, in simple terms, a habit as something you can change, and an addiction as something maybe you can’t. For most of us, at present anyway, technology is probably just a habit. A good way to tell if you are an addict is like Sura, a writer for the Huffington Post, “Last spring, when I rented a cottage on a lake in Salt Spring Island, B.C., I stayed on a remote part of the island that had no Internet or phone access. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time since I had wanted retreat and solitude. But in that first week, I noticed my uncomfortable feelings with not being connected to the rest of the world. I thought about how many emails were piling up in my inbox, and what was happening in the news. More than that, I knew what I really wanted was to distract myself from my own aloneness, to be preoccupied, instead of alone with my own thoughts.” (Sura) I wonder if Sura knows what a book is? They don’t need batteries or broadband to work. This story reminds me of a tale I heard years ago about the guy who wanted to quit smoking. He has a friend drive him up to a remote cabin in the mountains with enough food to last a week. He instructs his friend to come back and pick him up in seven days. When the friend returns at the specified time he finds the guy several miles from the cabin, walking along the road, muttering incoherently, looking for cigarette butts. Like I said, most of us aren’t that bad …….yet.
Before social media, when Blackberry was king, the “Crackberry” was the “gateway” device to technology addiction. In a 2008 WebMD article, Jennifer Soong documents the case of a young executive. Ms. Soong wrote, “Jenn Hoffman, Phoenix-based CEO of The J Brand Group, should have been enjoying a relaxing vacation on the Cote d’Azur. Sipping champagne and nibbling on cheese at the posh Louis XV restaurant, she was eagerly awaiting her entree, a poached Breton lobster. But then, poised next to the breadbasket, her BlackBerry Pearl came to life, and so did her technology addiction.
She lunged for it and swiftly pecked out a response to my request for BlackBerry anecdotes: “I’m so addicted to this device that I stopped mid-bite to rush to send this message. My dining partners are staring at me with contempt as I write this.”
“My BlackBerry runs my life,” Hoffman says. She’s got a 24/7 technology habit, even checking messages from the bathroom, a Whistler ski lift, and a pool raft at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont hotel. Her boyfriend calls her laptop, which she brings to bed every night, “the other man.” (Soong) If you can get past the pretentious, saccharin style of this story without vomiting on your shoes, you might notice that it illustrates how obsessive people were even half a decade ago.
In the almost five years since this article first appeared, many factors have exasperated the technology craving and spread it to almost every demographic group. Cheap phones and carrier plans make technology easy to access and therefore more wide spread in the total population.
Are we raising a generation of tech junkies? Just look around any campus, or for that matter anywhere people collect, think Starbucks, and you will observe this new behavior. Most are focused on their phones, tablets or laptops, totally oblivious to what is going on around them. Facebook and Twitter dominate their lives. It’s as if some “force” is directing them to document every nuance of their day.
In 2011, the International Center for Media and Public Agenda at the University of Maryland conducted a study where they ask about 1000 students in 10 countries to stop using technology for 24 hours. The typical response was, “I was itching, like a crackhead, because I could not use my phone.” Taking into consideration youthful tendency to exaggerate, this is still a rather shocking revelation. The study’s general conclusion is that, ” If you are under 25, it doesn’t matter if you live in the U.S. or Chile or China, Slovakia, Mexico or Lebanon: you not only can’t imagine life without your cell phone, laptop and mp3 player, you can’t function without them.” (Staff) As disturbing as some of these comments are, at least the participants seem to realize they have a problem, they see the devices as something separate from themselves that intrudes on their “humanness”. The really concerning attitudes are those voiced by observers that relish the day when technology becomes part of us.
Scott Klososky, a writer for Technology Story, looks forward to the day when we have computer interface brain implants. A time when technology breaks through the barrier that separates humans from machines. He writes, ” I suspect that most people will LOVE having technology imbedded so that they will have faster and more permanent access to all the benefits technology brings us.” (Klososky) I conducted a very unscientific, informal survey on the campus of Kennesaw State University and found Klososky to be right. Of the ten students interviewed eight were open to the idea of some form of direct interface to electronic devices. Most were young, early twenties, and I suppose the idea of learning without having to study might have played a role in their decision. Maybe the social science building wasn’t the best place to conduct a survey on technology. As I said this was a very informal survey and I wouldn’t put too much credence in the findings.
The idea of augmenting our physical bodies with advanced technology evokes different reactions from different people. Most laugh it off as the stuff of science fiction. However, there is some serious research being done in this area. Raymond Kurzweil, a well known engineer and researcher told Lev Grossman, a writer for Time.com, “We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he’s not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.” (Grossman) Kurzweil gave a speech at the Singularity Summit in 2011 that goes into more detail about his beliefs. This embedded link will take you there: Kurzweil Speech.
As I approach the end of this work I would like to leave the timeline, and address a more serious aspect of technology addiction. Texting is, without doubt, the primary distraction when it comes to technology. There are stories of people falling into open sewers and public fountains. The list of seemingly stupid things we do while distracted by our devices are almost endless. Undoubtedly, driving is the most serious. Bill Davidow, of the Atlantic, posted some interesting facts, “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has estimated that in the past year more than 3,000 people lost their lives in accidents related to distracted driving. As a point of reference, in 2009 there were 10,839 fatalities attributed to driving while intoxicated. Texting was cited as the probable cause in the 2010 Gray Summit, Missouri, school bus accident that killed two and injured 37. Texting was also the probable cause of the Metrolink train crash that killed 25 and injured another 135. And hospitals are having trouble controlling the inappropriate use of electronic devices in operating rooms. In one case, a neurosurgeon who made ten phone calls during an operation caused partial paralysis in a patient.” (Davidow) How can, otherwise, intelligent people do such stupid things? I ask myself this question every time I see stories like these.
In conclusion, we have to ask ourselves several questions: Is technology a habit or has it become an addiction? If it is an addiction, does it bring with it all the negative connotations the word implies, or do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? Is becoming part machine something we want for future generations or is that going too far? If we do augment our biological selves with implants will the evolutionary process take over and our natural sensory organs go the way of the appendix? Where do we draw the line? My answer: Hell if I know!
At the beginning of this paper I thought technology addiction was akin to something trivial. Now, it seems to me we are on a track we can’t get off. A runaway train with no brake. In a pickup truck five seconds after we lit the JATO rocket mounted in the bed! All things considered, I feel it is appropriate to end this research paper with an often over used, and sometimes misused cliché:
“Resistance is futile…..your life as it has been……. is over…..you will be assimilated.” (Borg)
Bibliography
Borg, Locutus of. Locutus of Borg. 1989. 2 October 2011 <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Locutus_of_Borg>.
Davidow, Bill. Technology Addiction will lead to our evolution or enslavement. 6 January 2012. 1 October 2012 <http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/technology-addiction-will-lead-to-our-evolution-or-enslavement/250951/#>.
Grossman, Lev. 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. 10 February 2011. 2 October 2012 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299-1,00.html>.
Klososky, Scott. Social Augmentation: Is Technology Addiction really bad for us? 25 April 2012. 2 October 2012 <http://www.technologystory.com/2012/04/25/social-augmentation-is-technology-addiction-really-bad-for-us/>.
Soong, Jennifer. When Technology Takes Over Your Life. 6 June 2008. 30 September 2012 <http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/when-technology-addiction-takes-over-your-life?page=3>.
Staff. Students around the world report being addicted to media, study finds. 5 April 2011. 1 October 2012 <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110405132459.htm>.
Sura. Addicted to Technology. 9 August 2012. 29 September 2012 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sura-flow/technology-addiction_b_1740068.html>.
Tim Kidson. Business: Addiction or Habit. 1 June 2012. 27 September 2012 <http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=177785>.
Gnostic Science Fiction 